The Shark Cage: Fear in East Timor
Parry, Richard Lloyd
EARLY EVERY Sunday morning, Bishop Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo, the winner of the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize, held Mass in the garden of his residence in the East Timorese capital, Dili. The day...
...You are strong...
...76 n DISSENT / Spring 2002 EAST TIMOR WHATEVER OTHER mistakes UNAMET made, as an electoral exercise the referendum was an astonishing success...
...Either he's throwing in the towel," said my British friend Alex, "or he knows that somethingvery nasty's going to happen...
...Do you have any cigarettes...
...He is writing a book about Indonesia and East Timor, to be published in the United States by Doubleday and in the United Kingdom by Picador...
...And the violence we witnessed was so messy, indecisive, and ugly...
...There was silence...
...The wall divided the UNAMET compound from an abandoned school next door...
...Two hours after that the cockerels started crowing and with them began another distinctive sound, the low, whispering bustle of the waking refugees...
...The satellite lines were congested, so I called London on my mobile phone and dictated the story, reading it out word by word...
...It felt like a sciencefiction film, a journey through a town overtaken by body-snatchers...
...There were two thousand now, but their presence could not have been more discreet or unobtrusive...
...I locked the door behind me...
...His legs were bent permanently beneath him by accident or disease, and it took him five minutes to cross the room, collect his ballot, and shuffle into the booth in front of me...
...Two Australian radio reporters ran up dressed in helmets and flak jackets and began loading their bags into the truck...
...He let me go and shook my hand gravely...
...A line of tables had been set up, bearing pens, pencils, a box for the registration forms, and a plastic bottle of ink for marking the fingers of those who had voted...
...On the steps of the hotel, people were DISSENT / Spring 2002 n 77 EAST TIMOR standing around uncertainly...
...Er, you just said 'referendum,' David," someone would point out...
...And then...
...The polling station staff were sealing up the ballot boxes after showing their empty insides to the observers...
...We hurried outside, and now there was a new noise—the screaming of women, close at hand, but muffled, coming in waves from over the wall...
...I began to think about what I would write...
...Pop, pop went the blunderbusses in the background...
...I would leave on Tuesday afternoon...
...I know a death threat when I hear it...
...Should anyone have been surprised...
...And it was not as if the violence was an instinctive reaction...
...In April they threw hand grenades into a church where fifteen hundred refugees had sought shelter, and shot and macheted dozens of them as they fled...
...You have this...
...The rounds were purely for effect...
...Streets are impassable without armed escort...
...I dreamed of all the certainties that had gone from Timor: the child's trust in the parents, the parents' promise that everything will be all right...
...From the truck, the compound suddenly seemed a very safe place to be...
...How remarkable, for example, that, despite the close shaves, none of the "internationals"—no journalist, observer, or foreign UN worker—had been killed...
...He had got on the morning flight to Jakarta, and it was difficult to tell whether this was a good sign or a bad one...
...Two dozen armed marines stood at the front of the hotel...
...Crackle, crackle...
...I took many photographs...
...People were trotting urgently across the garden carrying bags and equipment...
...By the beginning of May 1999, after further talking in New York, Portugal and Indonesia reached an agreement: the UN would supervise something called a "popular consultation...
...The offices were plain, whitewashed structures, many of them former classrooms, shaded by big green trees, and every vacant space was occupied by a Toyota Land Cruiser...
...I could make out the familiar landmarks: Motael Church and the cathedral, Bishop Belo's house, even the Turismo...
...He gasped as we turned the corner...
...It would involve a period of political campaigning, a choice between two options (autonomy or its rejection), and a popular vote...
...They harmed no one directly, but they didn't need to...
...John's jeep quickly filled up with people who needed rides...
...In the whole country, only 6,000 people had failed to vote out of an electorate of 438,000...
...They streamed in from all directions, in groups large and small, carrying bundles of food, infants, and even rolls of bedding...
...the wheels rumbled below us and then came that moment of sudden lightness and lift, and we were in the air...
...I found myself a camp table, a plug, and an ashtray, and sat down to write...
...A grenade, a military issue grenade...
...The period of most DISSENT / Spring 2002 n 75 EAST TIMOR intense negotiations coincided with the crisis and then with the air war in Kosovo, when the concentration of the organization had been focused elsewhere...
...This is the generation that will create history, and one day people all over the world will speak of us, of the warrior people and the brave-hearted...
...But even at the worst, I had watched them on my own terms...
...No one could say whether there would be any tomorrow...
...He was a thin, bespectacled man with a patient, bureaucratic manner which tended to enfeeble his angrier and more forceful statements...
...Law, reason, pity, civilization itself had shrunk to the breadth of the UN compound, to the few hundred square yards between the crumbling walls of the old teacher training college...
...The water all around was murky and cold, and there was a rushing noise in my ears...
...Half an hour out we saw a mixed group of machete-wielding militia and riflecarrying soldiers...
...By Saturday, none of these plans had been completed...
...After it was all over, when there was much bitter talk about UNAMET and its responsibilities, I sometimes recounted that conversation to Timorese who had lived through the violence...
...THROUGH THE SLATS, I glimpsed Dili utterly transformed...
...I stood there, waiting for somebody to stop me from going, to make me stay...
...It would distribute ballot boxes, ballot papers, and electoral lists, supervise the voting, transport the ballots back to Dili, and count them...
...Everything had been laid carefully in place, responsibility had already been dispersed across so many different departments, commands, and individuals, that no words were necessary...
...Before the referendum there was also an idea, popular among militia leaders, that having been cheated of their rightful victory, the pro-Indonesian forces would retreat to West Timor and take with them the four westernmost provinces, which would secede to Indonesia...
...This is what you will get...
...During the massacre in the church two months earlier, survivors reported seeing Indonesian infantry and members of the police mobile brigades, or Brimob, looking on...
...floor space quickly filled up with folded camp beds and boxes of food...
...We ran toward its stubby shape, cringing in the noise and heat...
...Good-bye, Richard...
...I was down to my last, my very last, packet, and the prospect of being without them made me feel weak...
...Outside, the UN staff organized the crowd into a rough queue...
...As I was paying the vendor and stuffing the packets into my bag, a pair of Aitarak men drove slowly by on motorbikes, eyeing the front of the hotel...
...We picked ourselves up, and the policemen riding with us snickered once again...
...RICHARD LLOYD PARRY is the Asia correspondent of the British newspaper the Independent...
...The gesture that many people regarded as the most flagrant insult to the UN had come the week before when the police had appointed a new head of the Dili branch of a local body of volunteer constables...
...Like all war zones, East Timor occupied an emotional place in the military psyche...
...There was more than half an hour to go until the polls opened, but already the green was filling with thousands of people...
...The airport was as ghostly as the town...
...I saw one Aitarak man with an AK-47...
...The warehouse had been looted...
...How strong is the fear that makes a mother lift her baby over her head and push him onto razor wire...
...Cannot guarantee security,'" someone else repeated...
...Finally the refugees calmed down...
...The shooting started up outside again...
...And far from being the solution, the Indonesian police, along with the Indonesian Army, were the root cause of the misery that followed...
...The day before the referendum on independence from Indonesia, when East Timor changed forever, I went there hoping to hear him preach...
...Without fuss or supervision, they had filled the space between the buildings with colored blankets and faded sheets...
...pointing to the captain's rifle...
...Plenty of senior Indonesian officers had served their time there, and for many of them, East Timor was the formative experience of their lives...
...The phones were ringing with requests for interviews...
...The first of three open-backed police trucks was already pulling up in front of the hotel...
...For all these tasks, it had adequate numbers of experienced personnel...
...Silence...
...He was the first UN worker to die...
...Reports of organized violent intimidation came from all over the country, but mostly from the west of the territory, close to the border with Indonesia...
...A murmuring crowd was gathering in the hotel's dingy lobby...
...My fear needed reasons, and it found them in the idea of evacuation...
...There were fewer than twenty of us—Alex and I, a handful of other newspaper correspondents, several stringers, a couple of documentary makers and a single photographer...
...This may sound a bit strange, but have you been scuba-diving at any time in the last week...
...The gun went off with a resonant pop, and we all cringed into the corners of the truck...
...They were the saddest dreams possible in such a place, and I woke with tears in my eyes...
...the pro-autonomy demonstrations inevitably ended in street fights, knifings, and deaths...
...At 10:37 p.m., there was an intense and prolonged burst...
...Numerous militias on street...
...Down...
...So they'll be out there with their guns, and we'll be in here unarmed, DISSENT / Spring 2002 n 73 EAST TIMOR trying to get out...
...Four thousand people, one-third of Maliana's population, had deserted the town...
...All afternoon, cars drove out of Dili as diplomats, electoral observers, activists and journalists dispersed across East Timor for voting day...
...And amid all this in May 1999 the United Nations landed in Dili, and the UN Mission in East Timor, UNAMET, was born...
...But the biggest and most obvious sign of change was on the roads...
...The machine gun fire stopped, and then another volley was heard again, followed by a new wave of collective screaming...
...This was the strangest and most fearful aspect of the violence in East Timor: it could be meticulous and methodical and at the same time so completely out of control...
...Do not be afraid...
...In Dili they were wary of journalists, but here they felt isolated and neglected, and their isolation made them eager to talk...
...Nobody I asked could think of one...
...At Dili airport, there was an air of bustle and urgency among the luggage handlers and the taxi drivers...
...In Dili, all of these were gone...
...There were Indonesian policemen in the school, bellowing at the refugees and trying to pull them back...
...But the rest of the town was all fires...
...The shooting had stopped, but it was obvious that it could start again at any time...
...I carried the camp table outside and finished writing my story in the open air...
...for the first time, they had been afraid...
...In charge was a dry, British-educated Canadian named David Wimhurst...
...At the quayside was a large barge, and in front of it a crowd of people waiting to sail to Indonesian West Timor, burdened with infants, mattresses, refrigerators, motorbikes, and even pieces of furniture...
...Some of them had lost as much as one can lose...
...The shooting resumed again in the middle distance...
...All aboard, ladies and gentlemen," he piped cheerfully...
...Eurico was no longer in Dili, it seemed...
...The most recent talk was of an "autonomy package" that would give the province control over certain of its internal affairs...
...I should have looked away, but I watched, and saw him painfully mark his cross in the lower of the two boxes, the one rejecting continuing association with Indonesia...
...Inside the Turismo we went to our shortwave radios and computers to check the headlines...
...The UN knew what it was doing when it came to elections...
...The tailgate was being raised, and the colonel was saying good-bye to those on board...
...The students have been attacked three times already, and they'll be the first to go...
...Its rear window was a mess of jagged glass pebbles...
...Thucka-thucka-thucka went the AK47s and the M-16s...
...People heaved up bags and boxes...
...The next to be admitted were the very elderly and the infirm...
...In the previous six months, with the undisguised support of the Indonesian Army and police, the militia had driven people out of their villages, burned their homes, and killed activists of the independence movement in an effort to intimidate the population and sabotage the referendum...
...The choice was held out to me, for more evacuation flights were scheduled today...
...It sounded like a referendum, but Indonesian national pride was at stake, and so, officially at least, it could never be referred to as such...
...No, the warehouse had been burned...
...I paced around the compound, seeking out corners that I had not seen before, as if its physical structure, the condition of the paths and roofs and windows, could provide me with an answer to my dilemma...
...But on my first visit it made little impression...
...Even the babies hardly cried, and despite the uncertainty, the rumors, and the shooting all around, there was no pleading or begging, no ranting or ill-temper or threats...
...The staff were moving in themselves...
...I'll see you in Darwin...
...Crackle...
...Along the cliff roads and above the sea, in the markets, they glided through the rabble of bicycles and station wagons, like dieselpowered swans among ducklings...
...It seemed inevitable that at some point there would be a general withdrawal to the airport...
...The result was announced in the ballroom of the Mahkota Hotel at 9 a.m...
...After dark, they sat in family groups, whispering to one another or singing prayers and hymns pianissimo...
...The Hercules could be heard, its engine DISSENT / Spring 2002 n 83 EAST TIMOR roaring out on the tarmac...
...When the announcement came, it was almost anticlimactic...
...Whatever the outcome, the eagle of liberty has spread its proud wings over the people of East Timor and nothing, by God's grace, will ever take it away...
...I hurried back to my room, shouldered my knapsack, and hesitated over my suitcase before deciding to leave it...
...Around the country, pro-Indonesian, anti-independence paramilitary groups, known as the militias, sprang up...
...But overall the day had gone more smoothly than anyone had dared hope...
...I didn't know...
...Several independence supporters had been murdered by the militia, and there were constant threats against UN staff...
...He brandished a homemade blunderbuss, which he pointed toward us...
...Four out of five East Timorese had voted for independence...
...The children were being forced onto the barbs...
...The UNAMET walkie-talkie on the desk where I wrote crackled out the conversations of the CivPols as they warily patrolled the compound...
...THERE MAY indeed have been orders from the top, but when the time came nothing so direct as an order was necessary...
...But the most convincing answer was that the UN had little choice...
...One element was common to all of them—the involvement of the Indonesian police and army, both as passive observers and active participants...
...They talked about the Besi Merah Putih, the local militia whose name meant "Red and White Iron...
...Ian Martin, the special representative of the UN secretary-general, walked in quickly and read out the results...
...They don't speak English...
...At the UN compound, nobody was surprised to see us...
...Now that," said the colonel, "was close...
...I fell asleep without difficulty...
...The electricity supply would be cut to the entire town...
...instead, I had a portable computer in a leather bag...
...Three nights earlier, the house where the UN's military liaison officers lived was under fire for three hours...
...And the Indonesian police are responsible for its security...
...They felt no need to cower in the bottom of the truck—our guards, here to protect us against an attack by their own comrades...
...They swam around the cage with terrible speed, and their noses clanged against the bars, which bent and snapped and fell away...
...At exactly 6.30 a.m., the first voters were allowed in...
...It's a compromise, but look how happy he is...
...The system's not perfect, in fact it's terrible, and God knows what's going to happen before this is over...
...This was the problem...
...Hour by hour, the morale of the mission was fraying, and all morning UNAMET people sidled up with alarming and subversive nuggets of information...
...A captain in the Indonesian marines was standing at the front of the hotel talking to the few journalists who understood Indonesian...
...Nonetheless, the Indonesian marine corps was "unable to guarantee security...
...The sides were made of wooden slats, with inch-wide gaps between them...
...Two large Indonesian naval ships lay at anchor off shore...
...The chief of the MLOs, a Bangladeshi brigadier, strode about in dark glasses brandishing a little cane that quivered as he walked...
...They spoke of the local military commander, who made no effort to disguise his relationship with the militias and his contempt for the UN...
...Later I would hear this described as a gesture of "gratitude" to the United Nations for "protecting" Joanna Rodriguez and her family...
...The captain smiled and shrugged and spread the palms of his hands wide...
...East Timor is free...
...Ten minutes later came a loud, proximate boom that shook the windows and was followed by the shrill sound of more automatic fire...
...Briefcases, suitcases, boxes, and backpacks were stacked up against them to form an unstable inner wall...
...I dreamed of being a small child: of going to church with my grandparents, of holding the hands of my mother and father...
...But among army and police officers in East Timor itself, and at least among their immediate superiors in the regional command, there was a remarkable degree of planning, coordination, and control...
...I began to dread the sight of the refugees, for I was becoming preoccupied by a single question: should I stay or run away...
...José Ramos-Horta, who had shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Belo, had words for the defeated supporters of autonomy: "They have not lost—they have won a country" There was even a reaction from the Aitarak leader, Eurico Guterres...
...Had any free election anywhere in the world ever secured such a remarkable turnout...
...They were there for a reason: to vote and then to get back home as quickly as possible...
...Afterward, when it was too late, the question was put repeatedly, and various answers were proposed...
...A similar panic had occurred the previous week, and someone in the UN had taken a decision: not only had the door been locked, but the top of the wall had been festooned with bales of bright new razor wire...
...Radio aerials curved from their potent hoods...
...The militia told their victims that this 74 n DISSENT / Spring 2002 EAST TIMOR was what they could expect for supporting independence, and that if they were stupid enough to vote against autonomy, worse would come...
...Then I just stood and listened to the screaming...
...He looked terrified...
...A New Zealand MLO clambered in and took charge of the loading operation...
...He was christened Pedro Rodriguez, and his middle name was given as UNAMET...
...In front of them, milling singly and in groups, were hundreds of soldiers and black-shirted militia...
...Stone-throwing militiamen had attacked the local office of UNAMET, the United Nations Mission in East Timor, and the mood among its staff was quite different from that of their colleagues in the capital...
...a few miles further on was another militia group, carrying its own M-16s...
...Independencia...
...But why not...
...on Saturday, September 4. The announcement was not due for another three days, but the count had gone quickly...
...Repeated gunfire on the way to the airport...
...A white UN helicopter, stenciled with the blue symbol, buzzed to and fro...
...across the country, hundreds of thousands remained to be cast...
...We have a group of men, possibly military, possibly militia, moving away from the west wall of the compound...
...There were no cheering crowds, no jubilation...
...There's the glow of a fire on the horizon...
...In the weeks leading up to the vote, it would create an electoral register and conduct a public information campaign by radio, television, newspaper, pamphlet, and public information tours throughout the territory...
...There were rumors that the militias were planning a "sweeping" operation in which thousands of them would descend on Dili to kill and drive out their opponents...
...Power-steering their way around every corner, parked in front of every official building, were the emblem of the United Nations in the third world: white Toyota Land Cruisers...
...Jakarta's silence was the command...
...Then they can do whatever they like," he said...
...they carried automatic rifles and long combat knives and wore flak jackets...
...I stood up and walked toward the truck...
...I braced it vertically between my head and the wooden sides, and wondered exactly what effect the interposition of a Toshiba laptop would have upon an M-16 round...
...The Australian who ran UNAMET's Maliana office thought that his bosses in Dili did not take his concerns seriously...
...The town grew distant as the plane rose, but I felt myself to be the one who was sinking, as if I were looking up at Dili from the bottom of a deep and narrow well...
...Someone else took responsibility for establishing escape routes from the hotel, in case it should be attacked...
...Then in May 1998, President Suharto, the Indonesian dictator, was forced from power by protests in Jakarta...
...But we didn't, and we're here...
...The place had completely filled with refugees, who were eating and sleeping on the floors of the classrooms...
...No one knew...
...It was strange: here we were, witnesses to this remarkable news, and yet for the moment what we had seen with our own eyes was less important than the rest of the world's reaction to it...
...Evacuation was imminent...
...Martin read out a statement on behalf of the secretary-general, Kofi Annan, but even before he finished, people were walking out of the room...
...On the tops of the desks, UNAMET walkie-talkies sat in their rechargers, crackling out conversations between the CivPols and MLOs, as they peered out into the darkness...
...the walls and floor of the cage were thin aluminum bars...
...Soon there were no bars at all, just me suspended alone in the current with the sharks swimming around me, brushing my diving suit, circling me over and again, as I waited for the parting of the jaws and the lunge that would end it all...
...Evacuation had been postponed...
...In Atsabe, a Timorese who was working for the UN was stabbed through the lung and died two hours later...
...Everyone in the press room jumped to the floor and crawled up against the walls and beneath tables...
...When they fire into the air you just hear the crack...
...the child, a boy, was baptized immediately by a member of the UN mission who happened to be a Jesuit priest...
...The UN could have said no, and the whole thing would have been called off," one of the UNAMET staff said to me, "and for the next twenty-three years, we'd have had chunks ripped out of our sides for the great opportunity that we'd thrown up...
...they shouted...
...The Indonesians in East Timor were notorious as thugs, torturers, and sadists...
...Now somebody was firing a machine gun over their heads...
...We began by drawing up a list of our names...
...It was more of a two-fingered salute than a genuine attempt on our lives...
...There were no reports of significant intimidation...
...Children waved and cheered as it passed overhead...
...From his house arrest in Jakarta, the Falintil commander Xanana Gusmao said, "This day will be eternally remembered as the day of national liberation...
...The predicted attack on Maliana did not come that night...
...The policemen laughed as they pushed us over the wooden sides into the truck...
...I spoke with an Austrian news agency and the BBC, and the act of articulating the situation to an interviewer thousands of miles away made it appear far worse than I had previously imagined it...
...But why go to such trouble after the referendum...
...The Aitarak, or "Thorn" militia, attacked the house of an independence leader in Dili and killed thirty more people...
...Strict instructions had gone around the UN staff not to show any visible reaction to the result, and among the journalists this had also been agreed...
...The hold of the plane was dark and windowless, but the cockpit was flooded with light...
...That night, the UNAMET helicopter flew around the polling centers, collecting the ballots and bringing them back to Dili...
...It would take place in the next few days, after the referendum...
...Even after dark, there were young men and children on streets that formerly had been silent and deserted...
...The mother was a refugee named Joanna Rodriguez...
...In front of me was a Land Cruiser that had been shot up the previous day on the way to the airport...
...Have you heard...
...Even from this height, I could see the licking shapes of individual flames in the town center...
...The Turismo's staff had gone...
...The dawn service was always an occasion of soft dignity, with prayers and singing beneath the flowering trees...
...But there was no shoving and shouting, no obvious excitement, not even much smiling...
...Then they'll probably go for the priests, and then they'll try it on here, but with something a bit stronger than rocks...
...I felt an urgent need to fix in my mind the appearance of the compound, this mundane, remarkable place...
...The CivPols in the compound were carrying megaphones and booming uselessly through them in English...
...But at that moment I stopped wondering about the result...
...The older men and women wore batik headdresses, the younger ones wore cleanly pressed jeans and rubber sandals...
...UNAMET just doesn't have the authority," Wimhurst would say tetchily after another question about why the UN wasn't doing more to thwart the militias...
...His name was Joao Lopez Gomez...
...Of course, we're not supposed to give preferential treatment to anyone," said the UN volunteer at my side...
...My driver, a man named John, was there, and as I walked toward him he ran forward and embraced me, pressing his face into my shirt...
...It was the second vote of the day...
...Eventually, the crowd parted enough for us to squeeze narrowly into the hall...
...His work has appeared in Granta, the London Review of Books, and the New York Times Magazine...
...The weapon has been identified...
...It had all happened so quickly...
...People called out the headlines as they came up...
...In every village along the way there were guard posts manned by members of the pro-Indonesian militia...
...In the larger towns, the supporters of independence mustered huge crowds in peaceful rallies...
...Hooray for UNAMET...
...At 8.20 a.m...
...Very formally and politely, they checked our bags and passports and explained the operation of the seat belts...
...the rest carried spears or machetes, and the soldiers above us waved and smiled at them...
...IT HAD BEEN eight months since my last visit, and I only had to look around to see that something drastic had happened to East Timor...
...So I shouted out to the CivPol with the megaphone, "They can't understand you...
...John, John," I said...
...The clandestine groups opposing Indonesian rule had publicly set up shop in an office in the center of town...
...After dark, many of the refugees were slipping through here to spend the night on the summit, rather than in the snare of the compound...
...Soon, my head was beating with exhaustion, nicotine, and lack of food...
...The surge of adrenaline was ebbing now, and I began to feel deep weariness and inklings of dread, as if I had done something unforgivable and was only now beginning to remember what it was...
...In Ermera, two votes were lost when a ballot box split open as militia men fired blunderbusses and threw stones at the staff who were loading it onto the helicopter...
...Inside, final preparations were being made before the doors were opened...
...There was no space left in the press office, so I placed my bed outside, under the eaves of an old classroom...
...at any point I chose, I could step away from it to food, company, and a peaceful bed...
...Parents behind were pushing their children over the top...
...In the two days I spent among them, I saw no fights and no fits of temper, no thievery or truculence...
...Large-scale demonstrations were held and warily tolerated by the military...
...But here at least there were computers and power sockets and satellite telephone connections...
...Automatic rifles would be distributed among the militia...
...That night the man from the UN High Commission for Refugees told me that there were one hundred and fifty thousand people displaced across East Timor...
...It began with a new kind of shooting, not pop guns or automatics, but the long, ratcheting bursts of a machine gun, very close, from the other side of the compound...
...Marker was not slow to identify the agency responsible for this heartening outcome: the Indonesian police...
...The man they chose was Eurico Guterres, the "commander" of the Aitarak militia...
...Someone had removed all the light bulbs from the overhead sockets...
...The gunfire continued through the evening, sometimes close by, sometimes distant, but by DISSENT / Spring 2002 n 79 EAST TIMOR now it was little more than background noise...
...Bags were being thrown over and becoming entangled...
...The Indonesian police are entirely responsible for security matters up to, during, and after the referendum...
...It was a remarkable and thrilling sight...
...A match flared, and soon the only light in the room came from a dozen orange cigarette tips...
...In the late afternoon I dozed, and when I woke up everything had changed...
...Be brave, and choose the future of East Timor...
...one of the Indonesian speakers asked...
...But I liked to think of it as something more ambiguous and ironic: a reproach, as well as a plea...
...Papery litter drifted around...
...Are you leaving...
...A group of us squeezed into a Jeep and drove toward Maliana, a three-and-a-half hour journey to the west, close to the Indonesian border...
...84 n DISSENT / Spring 2002...
...There was jubilation among ordinary East Timorese and dismay on the part of Indonesian officials, army officers, and the powerful minority of East Timorese civil servants and regional chiefs who supported integration...
...The closer we got to Maliana, the more alarming the picture became...
...I felt a wave of nausea, like the shock of opening a neglected cupboard to find it teeming with rats or maggots...
...During the fifteenminute trip to the airport, I saw not a single ordinary person...
...When it was very late, we helped one another erect the clumsy camp beds...
...But it will get done, and whatever happens, the world will see it...
...Make the Aitarak go away...
...It must have seemed a good idea to get the news out as soon as possible, and to catch unprepared the plotters and the conspirators...
...Anyone could have predicted that they would fight to hold on to the place, using every vicious tactic they knew...
...The outer walls were crumbling cement...
...The final turnout was 98.6 percent...
...The engine pulsed and surged...
...I imagined the mutinous disgust among the younger UNAMET staff when the order came through, the angry fear of the East Timorese...
...If the guerrillas could be provoked to fight back, then the army would have the excuse it needed to call off the ballot and resume its operations...
...Small groups of women and children were converging on Bishop Belo's garden, where hundreds more were already camping out beneath the trees...
...A "warning" had been received that Aitarak was planning an attack on the hotel...
...The intention was to terrify but always, at the last moment, to turn the flat of the blade...
...The ballroom was packed...
...said the colonel...
...Those of us who had decided to stay gathered in the garden and organized ourselves...
...But when you hear the bullet singing, that means it's directly overhead...
...I was inside the back of the truck...
...there was a burst of phosphorescent tracer fire across the slopes of the hill...
...How could the UN have hoped for a peaceful referendum under such conditions...
...Whatever else happened, it seemed important to buy a lot of cigarettes...
...THE WORST THING happened about an hour later...
...The streets teemed with them...
...No outside agency had forced the popular consultation on Indonesia...
...Suddenly, the East Timorese had more freedom than at any time since the invasion...
...You want independence...
...At the very back was a gap in the wall beneath the steep slope that led up and away to the hills behind Dili...
...I pictured myself squeezed into a Land Cruiser for the proces82 n DISSENT / Spring 2002 EAST TIMOR sion through the streets, the snarling of the Aitarak motorbikes, the waving of the blunderbusses...
...You're quite right...
...I stood close to the gate and thought, what is the best thing to do...
...We were so obviously doing exactly what they wanted...
...A scared, flustered driver taking a wrong turn, the way blocked by militia, Brimobs looking the other way, and the seduction of a trigger, one squeeze, just to see: what would it look like...
...And they had bad news...
...I wore an old-fashioned diving suit...
...Burned houses, terrified moth8o n DISSENT / Spring 2002 EAST TIMOR ers and children, frightened UN workers—it seemed almost calculated to make the worst possible impression on international opinion...
...someone shouted...
...Someone volunteered to gather food supplies and look after the cooking...
...Indonesia invaded the Portuguese colony of East Timor in 1975, and during that time, by the most commonly quoted estimate, two hundred thousand people had died from the effects of war, disease, and famine...
...Now the bug-eyed, lickspittle Habibie was giving it away...
...The wall was only seven feet high, and people on the far side were attempting to climb over the wire...
...One suggestion was that the UN had been distracted...
...I found a camp chair beneath a wide cool tree on the edge of the yard and smoked three in a row...
...We are defeated diplomatically," he was quoted as saying...
...I said...
...Bags on the outside, bodies on the inside...
...The shops were boarded and shut, the houses still...
...There were about a dozen of us in the back along with eleven Indonesian soldiers...
...One theory had it that the violence was not principally aimed at the East Timorese, but at other rebellious provinces of Indonesia—at Aceh and at West Papua...
...There were stories that Indonesian government officials—barred, under the UN agreement, from any part in the referendum—were already running pro-autonomy campaigns in the mountain villages...
...The most obvious was to reduce the number of ballots cast for independence by terrifying voters into supporting the other side or by driving people out of their villages so that they couldn't register and vote...
...Ordinary Timorese, too, were making their plans—plans to leave the towns and head for the hills or the countryside, to send into hiding children and friends in the independence movement or, at the very least, to gather supplies in preparation for days or weeks of danger and isolation...
...the army was asking...
...I had no flak jacket...
...President Habibie's decision to allow the referendum was a historic opportunity...
...Afterward, I drank whisky with my friends, nibbled at the unappetizing rations, and smoked and smoked...
...Even the East Timorese guerrillas, Falintil, were spending more and more time in the town, sneaking down from the jungle for meetings, rest, and conjugal visits...
...A group of militiamen, apparently unarmed, stood beneath a large sandalwood tree...
...It was 78 n DISSENT / Spring 2002 EAST TIMOR becoming impossible to work in the Turismo...
...Ten minutes later, the alarm was over and the lights were back on...
...Under the terms of the agreement signed in New York, responsibility for all aspects of security lay with the Indonesian police...
...President Habibie himself had suggested it...
...If he were forced out or replaced (as he would be, by the end of 1999) that opportunity might be lost forever...
...A priest read out a message on the bishop's behalf: "Brothers and sisters, many people here in this time are very afraid...
...They tried to use clothes and bedding to cover its sharp teeth...
...But the plan came to nothing...
...Tears were on his cheeks...
...The violence, he believed, was not random and opportunistic, but part of a carefully laid plan that would climax in a militia attack on the UN and on known independence supporters...
...But it had only 270 civilian policemen— or "CivPols"—and just fifty military liaison officers— or MLOs...
...Soldiers and police watched him with amusement from just feet away...
...UNAMET'S Diu headquarters were on the campus of Dili's former teachers' training college, a place known to everyone as "the compound...
...The chairman of the escape committee had elected to stay on with a handful of others, but everyone else was moving to UNAMET...
...I marked my name down on the list, then took it off, and then marked it down again...
...I dreamed, too, of being a diver inside a shark cage...
...In 1997, on my first visit, Dili was a town of fear and spies, still living in the shadow of the most notorious of East Timor's massacres six years earlier, when hundreds of young mourners had been murdered by Indonesian soldiers in Santa Cruz cemetery...
...Are you going, Richard...
...The thrust of the questions DISSENT / Spring 2002 n 81 EAST TIMOR seemed to be, do you expect to be killed tonight...
...Behind us passed a stolen UNAMET Land Cruiser, driven by a grinning militiaman, although which were genuine East Timorese and which were soldiers in bandannas it was difficult to tell...
...There was a rattle of automatic fire, and with it a new sound, a migraine whistling that accompanied each report...
...It's not a referendum, it's a popular consultation...
...The leadership of their commanding officer, Colonel Timbul Silaien, had been "superb...
...I don't know...
...Good luck...
...Whether the East Timorese were flown out or left to their fate, it would be a time of dread and chaos...
...Their conduct, he said, had been "of the highest order...
...I doubt that I will ever experience another forty-eight hours so fearful and intense...
...The only difference between the militias and the Indonesian security forces was the uniform...
...This was the way it had been for twenty-four years...
...At passport control was an unexpected sight: a dozen young Australian soldiers, several of them women...
...I returned with vivid impressions of the awesome majesty which is manifest in the power of the people," he told a press conference in the Mahkota Hotel, late in the evening when the observers and journalists had returned to Dili...
...But we will not give up...
...I hereby announce that the result of the vote is 94,388 or 21.5 percent in favor and 344,580 or 78.5 percent against the proposed special autonomy...
...I had been in the compound for forty-eight hours and the sudden sensation of being outside and in motion produced a rush of euphoria...
...Many of the expressions were earnest, even anxious...
...a challenge to UNAMET, a direct look into Kofi Annan's eyes...
...In fulfillment of the task entrusted to me," said Ian Martin...
...I don't know...
...The police made no more than a token effort to disguise their enthusiasm for the militia cause...
...On the outer fringes of the crowd, people squatted on the grass and unwrapped small breakfast parcels of rice and vegetables...
...I don't know...
...The gates of the compound opened and an Indonesian Army truck backed in, the truck that would carry the day's evacuees to the airport...
...Would the CivPols follow their orders...
...People smiled thinly at one another, and congratulated the few East Timorese who were standing around...
...But later people cursed UNAMET for this decision...
...few places live so vividly in my memory...
...Off with the lights...
...The Indonesian government had freely signed the agreement with Portugal and the United Nations that brought UNAMET into being...
...I pulled myself off the man from the Sydney Morning Herald and looked back toward the hotel to see a militiaman run out from a side street...
...So the door was opened and the refugees came through one by one, calmly now, with sobs instead of cries, some of them gashed and bleeding where they had been bitten by the barbs...
...It had no chance of hitting us...
...the cause was hopeless...
...They pressed close against the wide, barn-like doors of the hall...
...What made it unbearably frightening was the presence of efficient and grown-up killers in army uniforms, egging them on, giving them guns and bullets, and joining in themselves...
...Popular consultation," Wimhurst would say quickly...
...Cannot guarantee security.' Well that's enough for me...
...On this Sunday, August 30, 1999, more people than usual were in the garden, although Belo had gone to a service on the south coast...
...in a few days we would return here when everything had calmed down...
...Much later, a Timorese friend said to me: "People died, I think, because they announced the result early...
...Another of the MLOs, a British colonel, was standing to one side watching...
...Independence...
...Another response was that the UN had caved in, capitulating to the Indonesians on this as it had so often done since 1975...
...Thick smoke from newly set fires rose close to the road...
...Among them was a middle-aged man supported on two broken sticks...
...The door quickly burst open, and people oozed through it, winded and crushed against the narrow wooden frame...
...It was dusk on Sunday when I had arrived at the UN compound...
...I looked at the Indonesians who stood above us with smirking expressions...
...In New York, the governments of Indonesia and the former colonial ruler, Portugal, continued to hold desultory meetings on East Timor, as they had done fruitlessly for years...
...Members of the food committee sat in the garden, discussing that night's dinner...
...A tremendous fusillade of automatic fire fetched up from close by as we passed the UNAMET gates...
...I could feel the terror almost physically, like a wind...
...They defied poverty, distance, climate, terrain, and, in some cases, dark intimidation in order to exercise their God-given right to vote in freedom...
...I still dream about the compound...
...I could feel tugs on the tube that connected me to the surface and I knew that it was a message in a code that I had once understood but that had become meaningless to me...
...He folded the paper, and began the painful walk to the ballot box...
...Without warning giant shapes emerged out of the dimness: sharks...
...On such mornings, the game was to ask questions anyway, in the knowledge that sooner or later he would make the inevitable mistake...
...Just a few quick health questions, sir," said a soldier with a red cross on her armband...
...The trucks started off with deliberate abruptness, and the Indonesians traveling with us guffawed again as the jolt sent us sprawling...
...East Timor was a proving ground and a symbol of the proud unity of the Indonesian state...
...There were more than a thousand people in the school, most of them women and children, and now they were all rushing, terrified, for the single door that connected the school to UNAMET...
...If such a man was able to ignore terror and infirmity to make his choice, there was little doubt what the rest of his brave people would choose...
...Since the referendum had been announced, Maliana had been the site of intense and violent militia activity...
...It hardly mattered...
...When I slept on my camp bed outside the press room, I didn't dream only conventional nightmares of pursuit and violence...
...Someone gave a mirthless giggle...
...And I dreamed...
...Spread out below in greens and browns, almost close enough to touch, was Dili...
...But once we were in the big truck I felt angry...
...Outside the press room a list was being drawn up of those intending to evacuate, and my friends were discussing what to do...
...It was quiet compared to other nights: one burst of concentrated automatic fire at midnight and a second one a few hours later...
...It was a fantasy—indeed, beyond the menace and violence, there was a childish quality to the whole undertaking: the oily alienated youths in their fighting fantasy militia uniforms, the drugs and the motorbikes, the toy blunderbusses...
...It terrified me to see it still there...
...Heads down, ladies and gentleman," said the New Zealander...
...It consisted of a walled rectangle a few hundred yards long, wedged up at the rear against a steep hill...
...Who threw that grenade...
...In East Timor, the army knew what to do, and once the violence started it gathered speed and power and continued until it had exhausted itself...
...Then they fell quiet for an hour or more...
...Would they make their escape up the hill...
...Many who went to the polling stations today did so under conditions of considerable hardship...
...But by the evening—my second in the compound—the character of the reports changed, and as I reviewed the events of the day, turning over in my mind what had happened and what might come, the little black radio began to give me the spooks...
...By lunchtime, across East Timor, four out of five of those who had registered had cast their votes...
...UNAMET...
...Fifteen hundred of them were here with us now, inside the compound...
...A bit later, he said, "We're asking for one last act of bravery from the people of East Timor...
...At other times and places in Indonesia, I had seen violence and cruelty...
...Smoke rising from the second floor of the electoral commission building...
...Houses of the Portuguese mission burning...
...From the Mahkota to the Hotel Turismo, where most journalists were staying, was ten minutes on foot, but this morning nobody wanted to walk...
...First inside was Guillherme Dos Santos, the regent of Bobonaro, a notorious sponsor of the Besi Merah Putih, plump and sleek in shiny batik...
...An invisible force field surrounded them: despite the surging volume of the crowd, no one approached within ten yards...
...The terror also served as a goad to Falintil...
...But not one of them said that it was a mistake, or that it would have been better if UNAMET had never come to East Timor in the first place...
...On weekdays, he gave a briefing in the room next to his office, although in the early days of UNAMET there was often nothing to say...
...A group of fifty UNAMET staff were preparing to break away from UNAMET and live in the hills with Falintil and the refugees...
...You don't want to stay with us, see this through...
...They had killed there, and seen their friends killed...
...Apart from a single vendor, the street was empty...
...That night, September 7, at a quarter to four in the morning, a child was born in the small clinic at the back of the compound...
...Don't worry about it...
...0 N THE DAY of the referendum, I dressed before dawn and walked with my East Timorese guide toward Maliana's polling center, a grubby sports hall that faced onto the town green...
...The police colonel overseeing the operation barked at us as we heaved up boxes and bags and bottles of water...
...For most of Monday, these exchanges were technical and uninteresting reports on the movement of troops, the direction of gunfire, and the movement of staff...
...The battle was lost...
...But everyone was taken by surprise when Suharto's protégé and successor, B. J. Habibie, suddenly announced that if its people rejected autonomy, East Timor could have its independence...
...The press office was responsible both for relations with the media, and for the public information campaign that UNAMET would soon launch on its own account...
...Aitarak, with its leather jackets, rusty machetes, and pop guns, was hardly a formidable threat...
...rvEN Now it is difficult to understand the violence, instigated and overseen by the I Indonesian Army, that followed the referendum...
...They were a picturesque force_ Each wore his national uniform while on duty: the police sergeants from Japan and the army men from Uruguay...
...FOUR PLANES full of journalists left the next day, and the population of the hotel dwindled to its dregs...
...His swagger stick was the heaviest weapon that UNAMET had at its disposal, for these were not "peacekeepers...
...Why had it not insisted on armed peacekeepers with the power to arrest, investigate, and, if necessary, to shoot those who used terror to get their way...
...Ambassador Jamsheed Marker, the grandiloquent Pakistani who was Kofi Annan's special envoy on East Timor, spent the day flying from town to town, and the experience stirred his poetic soul...
...Habibie's announcement appalled and affronted the armed forces, and the violence and intimidation they fomented had several goals...
...I T WAS ABOUT this time, mid morning, that a small new crisis unfolded within the larger one: simultaneously, it seemed, the entire compound was running out of cigarettes...
...I thought of the head of the escape committee and the small band that had remained in the Turismo, and wondered how they were...
Vol. 49 • April 2002 • No. 2
